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Burger King Runs Ad Triggering Google Home Devices; Google Shuts It Down (theverge.com)
Burger King unveiled a new advertisement earlier today designed to trigger users' Google Home devices. The ad specifically used the Google Home trigger phrase "Okay, Google" to ask "What is the Whopper burger?," thus triggering the Google Assistant to read off the top result from Wikipedia. But less than three hours after Burger King launched the ad, Google disabled the functionality. The Verge reports: As of 2:45PM ET, Google Home will no longer respond when prompted by the specific Burger King commercial that asks "What is the Whopper burger?" It does, however, still respond with the top result from Wikipedia when someone else (i.e., a real user) other than the advertisement asks the same question. Google has likely registered the sound clip from the ad to disable unwanted Home triggers, as it does with its own Google Home commercials.
Isn't this basically a blatant violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act? What if a small timer had done this and not a mega corporation?
The company that made the CueCat wanted to be able to do just this eventually. When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 00's we gave these stupid things away. Information coming down the pipeline said they eventually intended to make a device that connected to the PC and would respond to audio cues in advertisement on TV and open a browser to the product page. At the time it sounded retarded, like, "who the fuck would want such a thing?" Laugh's on me I guess, everyone wants an Echo or Home now.
from the article: ... its high amount of fat, cholesterol and sodium makes it an unhealthy food...
Well, not to defend Burger King (and a bit off topic), but if you're getting the appropriate amount of exercise your body won't metabolize the fat and cholesterol, and the original research that claimed salt is bad for you was flawed (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/); posting this kind of counter attack could be considered – by some – as misguided. Then again, most people don't get sufficient exercise and the fat and cholesterol is bad for them.
It wasn't uncommon in the early days of the web for people to shift the bandwidth load of their websites by linking to content on other people's web servers. When those other people figured out this was happening to them, they would replace the content with something else that the bandwidth "thief" didn't intend, e.g. smut, much to the bandwidth thief's embarrassment.
A better counter attack, IMO, would have been to replace the content Burger King was expecting with something else, e.g. an audio clip of Meg Ryan's faux orgasm from "When Harry Met Sally" or a clip of HAL saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
No, that's exactly what it is.
No, it's intentional, premeditated unauthorized use of a computer of computing device. You can bet the farm that nobody authorized Burger King to assume control of their Google device and cause it to access the Internet. That it was in the form of a broadcast advertisement for a large corporation doesn't make it any less heinous to my mind.
That risk already exists, is absurdly obvious, and has been made VERY clear on both tech forums and mainstream media. Anyone with ANY clue about phone security, and this includes people who lock their phone, has already disabled the voice feature so it isn't an issue for them.
Anyone with any clue about security already avoids these things. Many with no clue about security are buying them up for the shiny factor. It is scary because the sort of people who don't have a clue are the sort of people buying them. Even people who care about security are buying and using voice activated devices.
It's about as scary as the thought that if you leave your house front door open someone could just walk in.
The average person understands that risk quite well. They might not assess its severity correctly, but they understand it. The average person does not understand the risk of these smart devices, and they remain wilfully ignorant when more knowledgable individuals try to educate them. Now we have a set of devices that can potentially be turned into a bot net en masse just by a radio or tv broadcast and the usual owner of such a device doesn't have a clue that it's even possible. Hell, they could take all the right precautions (firewall, apply updates, isolated segments, etc) and still be had. This (https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/smart-tv-hack-embeds-attack-code-into-broadcast-signal-no-access-required/) kind of attack springs to mind.
It's scary because Burger King will probably get away with this, paving the way for other corporates to try on the same shit.
It's scary because "OK Google" isn't necessarily the only trigger word. The attacker only needs to convince the trigger algorithm. If they discover a sound or sounds that are innocuous but trigger it then they can trigger devices without being obvious about it.
It's scary because these devices have reached a critical mass large enough that a corporation took notice and exploited them.
I drink to make other people interesting!